


When Pasta and Chianti Aren't Enough

by angelinthecity



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017) RPF
Genre: Armie's POV, Ghost Spots for Armie and Timmy, Intentionally minimal and vague storytelling, M/M, Melancholy with a happy ending, Vignettes through the years, bittersweet romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-01 23:56:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19187815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelinthecity/pseuds/angelinthecity
Summary: Everything starts in Toronto.The third suggestion had been to make out. Being drunk out of our minds, it had sounded like a hilarious idea. But then he had liked it.





	When Pasta and Chianti Aren't Enough

**Author's Note:**

> This is somewhat different from my usual fare, but apparently I was on a bit of a melancholy mood this weekend and this came out. Hardly edited, because I wasn’t going for anything specific and therefore wouldn’t even know what to do with this. Thus, I refuse to let it sit in my drafts and am releasing it into the wild.

People had speculated since the beginning and we had gladly played into it, but nothing had really happened until that night in Toronto.

We were drunk from the vodka and from the sheer joy of a boys’ night out, for the first time in God knows how long. We had made a big show of ourselves at the event, talking to everyone, making sure they remembered we had been there, so that no one noticed when we left early from the side door.

We took the direct route to my hotel room to hang out, or not direct: we had tried his first, but the entrance had been populated with fans and we ducked our heads down and told the driver to keep going. I teased him endlessly about his bursting fame, he doesn’t blush easily but he squirmed on the backseat, embarrassed, begging me to stop.

In a stark contrast to that, he begged me to go on, when we had accidentally kissed, laying on my king bed.

Accidentally? Well, it had been a test.

One of us, I forget which one, had mentioned missing Crema.

In our throes of nostalgia we had tried to recreate that, and merely ordering pasta and chianti from the room service hadn't done the trick. The second suggestion had been to listen to the songs that Luca had always played for us, but Timmy said they just made him too sad now. The third suggestion had been to make out.

“Come on, that’s basically all we would do there during the days, and then break for lunch.”

Being drunk out of our minds, it had sounded like a hilarious idea.

But then he had liked it.

Not that I hadn't, but he really, really had liked it, begging me to kiss him again.

“I didn't realize this could be so fun.”

“What do you mean,” I asked, simultaneously flattered and offended.

“Without the crew and the sound guy and the camera, I mean,” he explained and latched on to my lips again.

At night, it was just silly kissing. Nothing our mouths hadn't done before.

The next morning when I wake up, he is still in my room, sprawled on the other side of the bed. Naked.

“I always sleep naked,” he mumbles still half asleep, when I comment on it.

I don't remember him taking his clothes off, and mine are still on. Maybe I fell asleep first.

Now he rolls to my side, apologizes. I tell him there's nothing to apologize for. He doesn't care that the sheets are no longer covering him.

“Nothing you haven't seen before,” he laughs, tired, and ends up coughing.

I get out of the bed, take a shower. When I come back, he's still there and asks: “Did we really kiss last night as much as I think we did?”

“Probably more,” I reply.

“I remember liking it,” he says.

You did.

“And now it's over?” he asks, sadness wafting in his words.

“Well, it's not like we can just keep–“

“Right. Right.”

 

In a few weeks someone from my team asks if I know if something's wrong with him. He's doing press at a film festival and isn't looking remotely like himself, rather looking like all hope has been drained from him.

I claim to know nothing, even if he called me the night before, said that he missed me, said that it only now sank in that we are not doing this together anymore. He said he missed other things, too, but I don’t let him continue because what would be the point. His eyes are serious on the screen of my phone as his thumb pulls on his bottom lip.

After the screen goes dark, I keep sitting alone in the living room.

 

He's like a puppy when we do hit a couple of the same events later that year. His eyes never leave me but I try to stay aloof, to wean him. To wean myself.

We do leave together from both of them, the first time I drop him off at his hotel and go home, against his wishes.

The second time his pleading works, and I stay over. No one's waiting for me at home, it's easy. What's not easy, is leaving the next morning.

He had kissed me the moment when I got on the bed, without waiting for me to settle in. Neither of us is drunk anymore, so it's not sloppy or playful as in Toronto. His tongue is deliberate; I'm the first to kiss beyond the lips.

One kiss pressed on his throat and it escalates fast, as if that one thing had given us the license to do everything.

We don't.

Not everything.

But when I come it's inside him and he's flushed and happier than he's ever been, he claims.

 

Obviously, it can't continue. I'm not a cheater and we are just friends. He's busy, I'm busy, we see each other when we can, but it doesn't happen again and we don’t talk about it.

Eventually we discuss it over text, and the wait for his reply is paralyzing. He's in London, and I have to wait till the English morning. He promises to stay an extra day before flying home so we can talk.

We all walk back together after the dinner, but she goes to bed early. I stay up with him, in his room, and we talk. Mostly.

 

Years later, it's a Sunday in late February and I'm tending to the steaks on the grill on our patio, when I hear her and the kids screaming in the living room.

"He won, he won!"

I smile to myself. Of course he did, it was only a matter of time.

I had told him that once.

On that one Valentine's Day eve in London he had asked if the same applied to us.

 

He visits whenever he’s in town, sits at our dinner table, and I miss him as soon as his car turns around the corner. I travel all over to locations, too, but rarely miss anyone as terribly. Mostly because I know the others will return to me. He, on the other hand, is quicksilver and every time he comes back to me, I’m just as surprised.

He never tries anything anymore, and I start to think he has forgotten. And then get mad at him, how could he. That visit almost gets ruined by my mood, until he forces the cause out of me.

We are sitting in the backyard, the sun in our eyes so I can’t see his expression when I tell him, but then he comes over, sits bluntly on my lap without waiting for an invitation and kisses me roughly on the mouth. It feels so fucking good that it takes a while for me to realize that now he’s mad at me, in turn.

“Forget? Are you fucking kidding me?” he spits out.

I get it, but he still leaves the same night.

 

Then there's the bright June afternoon when he’s back home and comes to visit me at my hotel. After hits and misses, I may have finally found my favorite hotel in New York. Ironically, it’s now that I'm planning to move there.

Toronto and the months that followed seem to be from another lifetime, but he's still here, I'm still here.

No one calls him Timmy anymore, he phased that out when he thought he was too old for it. I refuse to call him anything else and he lets me.

I’m nervous when he gets in, and I hide it behind fake confidence and big gestures. Offer him a drink which he doesn’t take.

He senses something’s different, because he always does.

I tell him of my needing a place in the city, smile and ask if he knows any. I thought I was being flirtatious but his reply is no-nonsense.

“I have a spare bedroom that you can stay in while you look,” he says without missing a beat because that’s what friends do.

Over the years he's stopped hoping, so I can't really blame him for not understanding my hint. I have to explain and he bursts into tears. Smiles. Runs to my lap.

He kisses less frantically now.

 

He stays over that night, but I never get to stay in his spare bedroom. We buy a place together soon and coming back from dinner one evening, we walk by one of his old places.

That's where you visited me the first time, he says and points at the window. I knew then and there, he says.

“When did you know?” he asks.

From the beginning of time, I want to say, but it doesn’t make sense.

**Author's Note:**

> [angel-in-new-york-city](http://angel-in-new-york-city.tumblr.com)


End file.
